About one year ago one of our short term SEO clients decided they were going to stop paying for SEO services. They had some unexpected fees come their way which made them have to tighten their wallet in a number of areas. This client had only been performing SEO services for 3 months. I just did a quick review of the work we had done over a year ago to get them started in their first three months. Sure, SEO has changed since the end of 2011 and early 2012. The actions we now take to improve search engine rankings are not the same as what we did then. However, in over a years time, even without any adjustments or changes to their website in any way, they are still ranking very will in all of their main keyword phrases except for one. No more payments to us, no more updates to their website. Just reaping continued benefits.
What does this tell us? How can we repeat to always have our SEO efforts stick even after we stop updating?
First, it tells us that our approach is (as we expected) in line with what search engines want. We focus first on expanding customer’s content, targeting specific key phrases that are relevant to their business and relevant to the users they target. We create high quality content around these phrases and optimize the page layout and display.
We earn extra backlinks to these pages and build supporting tier 3 pages to boost the power of the main tier level 2 pages we are trying to rank for.
Through monthly iterations, this process appears to Google extremely natural in development, and therefore is often long lasting. However, what is most important in 2013 for keeping your SEO work on top of google rankings is to make sure your visitor is not leaving your page instantly upon arrival. This is referred to as your bounce rate.
While google does not state that they use this to make adjustment, it is clear in our experience that pages with high bounce rate get flagged by google and often drop in rankings very easilily. Pages with low bounce rates (compared to others in the same space) will often jump in the rankings. Why? This is google’s clue that people that happened to visit this page are liking what they are seeing.
The best way to keep people on your page without triggering a bounceback:
- Answer the question they are seeking for the answer for. Users are smart. If they come to a page that doesn’t instantly give them the answer or show them what they are expecting to see, they are off to the next page. There are an abundance of websites out there and all fighting for eyes to come to their page. If you have done the hard work to get your site ranking for google, the least you can do is provide your visitors what they need when they come.
- Keep your hosting up to par. Slow websites are completely detrimental to your SEO. While google only takes a small consideration to slow page load speeds, users will bounce instantly if pages do not load instantly. Keep your website running fast to keep your bounce rate low.
- Organize your content. If you have a lot of content to share to users, organize it in a way that makes sense, but also works well for search engines. How many times do you find yourself searching through 2,000 word articles to find one paragraph answering the question your are searching to answer? Probably not too often.
- Mix and repeat. Don’t be afraid to re-iterrate important points across your website in multiple ways and in multiple areas. Its not fluffing up your website, but rather it is giving more opportunities to answer slightly different questions.
SEO is our passion. However, it doesn’t have to be your passion to be successful in building a business that thrives in search engine rankings. If you want to give your website a boost, try signing up for our free email course that inspires you to the proper changes to boost your rankings in google over the course of one year. Be ready, the first few months require some effort. Then it is just a matter of following our monthly recommended solutions to cruise into new visitors each month.
Jeremy Oms
Jeremy is an entrepreneur and leading manager of New Blood, Inc. Excited about all things Internet related, Jeremy spends much of his time project managing custom web applications and directing advanced search engine optimization efforts.
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